Coke in Green Glass Bottles
by 1848
Summary: 'They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America;' also, too much Watchmen.


America has come to hate the economic dispensability of questions and answers. No matter the sincerity or number of 'please's and 'thank you's tacked on, they will always appear too brutish to him, like the hash facades of bomb-brokered Romanesque cathedrals. Too severe. Too rude. Too impersonal. He adjusts his glasses, and realizes that perhaps questions and answers and formality have more in common with his orphan whores who, weaned from a generation too obsessed with cold wars and revolutionaries, lean uncomfortably at the junctures of avenues paved with glass and runaway trash bags. They both court and feign interest, but hold no substance. It pleases him, this sleazy lyricism. This unforgiving tendency to play with words and syllables like a hand in Poker. Born out of insecurity and necessity, these questions and answers and whores are the bastard children of scheming men in formal dress. They whisper blandishments with a whiff of sulfur. They make him feel sad in the early mornings - whores and questions and answers. This toxic combination. These aimless bodies and their electric isolation. Their unseen labour. This human instinct to learn more, to know their lover, their killer, their brother. And yet, the ease at which they pass by unseen; the filthy, worthless human rats. Nothing more than buildings, than facades, than windows.

America sees the architecture and the people, and he has to pause to consider the intangible luminescence of the latter. They are so alike. His skyscrapers and his citizens. And America feels like he belongs with these godless sodomites. Asia and Europe are worlds entirely different from his own. They've invented terms like _hubris_ that he has only understood in dog-eared pages. He, on the other hand, has never really felt or acknowledged the follies of American pride, because he was reared by the myths of Rome and the mirth of neo-classicism. It had taken him a while to learn that England himself had harboured his own mother of a revolution. But this grandeur and greatness of Rome and Macedonia is something that has lit a permanent flint in the corners of America's eyes. This Aeneid, this vast destiny. This brave, new world. It is his. He owes nothing to the four great eagles of Europe or the time-tested dynasties of Asia or the palaces of Arabia or the world, for that matter.  
And this sad affair of pomp and circumstance he sees that envelope England and France, Austria and Germany, Spain and Italy - it makes him bitter. They have inherited centuries of history. They have something he doesn't. He can hoard his wealth and fame and sun-splashed boulevards, but those slight glances - of longing, of fear, of doubt, of mutual nostalgia, of regret, of deep sympathy, of some possession of a higher truth - between France and England, why, it makes him feel so very sad and so very alone. And this heritage of culture and tradition and monarchs and royalties, he's always felt the bastard child of. He doesn't have kings or Popes or monuments, but he has his skyscrapers. His skyscrapers and malls and California bungalows that are so very like his people.

This pomp and circumstance. This adherence to tradition. This worship of it. How can you yield to a moment that's gone; how can you swear fidelity to the present if you're bowing to tradition? Giotto yields to Da Vinci who yields to Caravaggio who yields to David who yields to Picasso who yields to Gogh who yields to Dali who yields to Rothko who yields to Warhol. History is the eastern tier, a southern coast, with waves crashing in a bacchanalian fit, like the organic breaths in the sinews of a body. Writhing, all neat and shiny. History is progress, history is a pendulum swing, history is a class struggle, history is Hegelian, history is the present, history is a Michelangelo's David in the making - a beautiful colossos that will never be finished, that has lived a lifetime in the prime of his youth, from blooming sexuality with Donatello to passionate theatrics and no bull-shit ferocity with Caravaggio.

And hadn't Hitler said it all, really? As long as the lie is loved, as long as it is big, they will, with gaping mouths and hungry stomachs, believe in it. Create a lie more beautiful than the truth, and they will fashion altars. No one visits slaughterhouses for the beauty. Everyone does with it for the meat. For their appetites.

As America thinks on a 5:14 to Bristol.

"We never had a chance," the man next to him answers, quietly. The man next to him - the man he's fucked, the man he's loved, the man whose throat he wants to slit in the neon alleys behind bars weighted down by trenchcoats and cigarettes - smiles.

And in the subway, with its syllogisms and parallel lines, he's Orpheus, looking for Eurydice in a 5:14 to Bristol. He finds him, all cracked lips and raw hands and oily smirk. Green-bottled coke in his lap.

"Hey, boo," says the man with the American coke bottle. "Warhol's in town."

"So was Sergei's Potemkin."

"Like, fifty years ago," America flips the bottle cap like a coin. He flips it like a god playing dice with the universe. "You aren't still sour about all that mindless fuck, right? That McCarthy shit and Soviet stand? It's all a joke, it's all a farce."

Because Africa is a joke, because Indochina is a farce. Because he'd have carved the Pacific for a few good laughs. He's good-humoured like that.

"Hey, why'd we do all that?"

Because we believed in it. Because we didn't love enough. Because we thought history was moved by monoliths and movements and ideas and standoffs and forces and people. And because we were right. Because history was measured by steel and guns and bodies in motion. Because we were disillusioned. Because we were young. Because we loved too much. Because we were aborted children who couldn't keep faith. You, with your Europe. Me, with my Europe. You, with your British. Me, with my Mongols. We never had a chance. We had too much going against us. We were born into it.

"... Who won?"

"I think you did."

Leisure and consumerism and consumption and banality and meaningless objects and billboards and adverts and mass-production and surburban homes and public transport and nuclear families with Chesapeake bay flats and McDonald's and Disney and Vietnam. Napalm bombs and Happy Meals, don't forget your complimentary drink. No one looks at slaughterhouses for the beauty. No one likes what they see. They do it for the meat. They do it for their appetites.

"Warhol's in town, my Ruskie."

Campbell tomato soup cans that mean nothing to no one; bought in bulk and shipped by boat, to a grocery store dictated by economics. Just objects. Just green flappers. Somebody's three-ninety-nine lunch, but no one's daughter. No one's mother. No one's lover. Good night, lovers.

"And where's the success of capitalism in Sudan, in Bangladesh, in Cuba?" he asks. It's an attack, almost, but a weak one at that. He doesn't want to fight anymore. He's tired. His people are. It's eighty-five, and it's forty years too late to shed tears. Men, fathers, and brothers cried in the forties; women smeared red lip-stick in the forties; children starved, and rich men chortled on their Sunday promenades while staining the New York Times with coffee mug rings in the forties. No one cries in the eighties. Everyone's too busy scuttling on with being a revolutionary, with being angel-headed youths ruined by powder and dust and jazz. Too late.

And so... Where's the success of communism in Ukraine? In China? Where's the success of communism in Poland? In Hungary? In East Germany? In Yugoslavia? In the Soviet Union? is the unspoken response. Mind your own business, you filthy Roose, America wants to bark. Who is this joke to judge a country a Pacific away?

"Well, West Germany's doing well," Russia tells the American salesman, veteran, lover, and boy. "There's your victory. There's your great legacy." He wants to spit on the floor. Let the phlegm shine and wriggle.

"Fucking countries," he whispers. "I don't fucking care about fucking countries. I don't owe them shit. I owe them no courtesy. It's the people. They're all I care about. They're all I really ever cared about."

Funny. Tell your gamins and urchins and drug addicts and whores. Tell your nutters and drunkards and crazies that they've got their homeboy, that he wanders the tarred roads as a baby lost in a cradle. A roaming boy raised by plains and buildings and pavements.

"Consider it a goal achieved. No one believes you give a cunting fuck about anyone else. American neocolonialism, something like that. The perpetuation of an old system under a new name. You and your liberty, and your freedom. Liberation and democracies - just another name for imperialism, da?"

America's eyes squint behind his thin lenses, "Fuck you. Everyone pays a price for freedom. What do you and your men know, you goddamn Commie?"

"'England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.' Don't you dare tell me I don't know about paying prices. You were in the Pacific, not in Ukraine, not in Belorussia. You're the same dumb and deaf boy when we met on the Rhine."

It's his stop. America steps off unto the platform. He got on a scared boy, he leaves a scared boy. Before the doors close, he places his bottle cap in buzzing Russian hands.

"Warhol's in town."

"So, I've heard. Hey, listen, boy. I'm sorry. You're just a bull-headed, stubborn kid, and I'm old and tired. I've never been patient," and he gives his fellow foreigner - tourist - a weary smile. An honest, weary smile. His face collapses in his hands, and his shoulders shutter forward. He's all but bones folding in on themselves like delicate doilies. "I'm so tired. I'm so glad. It's going to end soon."

America sneaks a weak smile. He's terrified. He's defined himself by wars and American troops for around-about seventy years. The huns, the Germans, the Prussians, the Italians, the Japanese, the... and the list goes on, lists of countries and names, never people. And what will he do when he is no longer defined by an epoch? When he is no longer a point in an axel of West vs. East? When the Iron Curtain has been torn down and sent to the dry-cleaners? He's found himself by the movements around him... so how can he possibly define himself in his solitude? "Gorbachev, isn't it?" he chokes. The bell rings, the doors are closing. He drops off his vintage green Coke bottle with the Russian.

Russia smiles and catches America's hands before he leaves. He places a kiss, a supplication to a Great-er Perhaps, on the backside of his palm. "American love," he whispers, "like Coke in green glass bottles... they don't make it anymore."


End file.
